Keboola co-founders Petr Šimeček (left) and Pavel Doležal (right)

Image Credit: Keboola

Data is the need of the hour. Be it a small business or a large enterprise, companies of all sizes across all sectors are racing to mobilize their data assets to drive efficiencies and accelerate growth. However, the problem with being data-driven is the need to set up a full-fledged data stack. This means teams have to select, acquire, configure and integrate an endless list of technologies to start pulling and using data.

Now, this is not only expensive but enterprise users can also end up spending most of their time working on and maintaining the infrastructure instead of using it.

Keboola integrates data stack

To address these challenges, Prague-based Keboola delivers dataops as an end-to-end service that takes less time, money and human resources than what’s usually required. The company today announced it has raised $4.5 million in a seed round of funding, led by Presto Ventures.

Built on Snowflake, Keboola’s platform brings the entire data stack on a single interface and automates all infrastructure operations, enabling organizations to fully focus on using the data infrastructure for business intelligence and new products instead of worrying about costs and maintenance friction. At the core, it offers a developer-friendly back-end, which supports API integrations to various tools from the modern data stack, including dbt, Apache Spark, MLflow, OpenLineage, Jupyter and Hightouch, as well as a simple-to-use, no-code front-end that can be operated by any non-technical business user to mobilize data.

“The overarching idea is that Keboola will cut down on the need for data specialists (data analysts, data scientists, etc.) to be implanted in every business department that could potentially benefit. Rather, fewer developers can integrate Keboola across an entire company, easily plugging in modules and apps (including from outside developers) on an as-needed basis (per department demands),” Pavel Dolezal, CEO and co-founder of Keboola, told VentureBeat.

 “Business users, meanwhile, are able to reap data insights quickly and easily with a single unified interface. When most businesses these days are working with an average of 15 different standalone data tools (integrated manually on an ad-hoc basis) a single interface becomes very attractive. Keboola simply makes the data work, cutting down time and problems between idea and data product,” he added.

The company, which has been bootstrapped since being founded in 2017, counts RBI (restaurants), DXC, ProductBoard, Mall Group, Sportissimo and Rohlik Group among its customers and is on track to double its revenue next year. Its ARR for 2021 was $5 million and ARR for the ongoing year is projected to reach $8 million.

Funding to grow footprint

With this funding, which also saw the participation of Reflex Capital and multiple angel investors, the company plans to grow its footprint, particularly in European and North American markets.

“The funding will be used for internal sales team growth, tech partner network extension, and the establishment of a performance marketing team. Key objectives are growing sales and demos, accelerating subscriptions and conversions, and breaking into the U.S. markets. Product-wise, because Keboola is a relatively open framework, development is a continuous process! There are many moving parts, and product has remained a core focus from day one,” the CEO added.

However, Keboola is not the only player in this space. Many other companies are currently working to simplify how enterprises mobilize the modern data stack, including Starburst, Airbyte, Census, and Talend. According to IDC research, as many as 89% of organizations view dataops as “important, very important, or extremely important” yet only 10% of organizations have fully implemented it thus far.